Bona fide subliminal shots—significant action that flashes on the movie screen too quickly to be perceived consciously—are rare. The few recent examples use a different technology from the ‘Drink Coca-Cola” experiments in the 1950s.
The 1950s experiments used a tachistoscope, a sort of slide projector capable of flashing a still image on a screen for a split second. The movies themselves were projected separately. At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, movie theater, marketing researcher James Vicary pointed his tachistoscope at the screen and flashed two written messages during movies: “Hungry? Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola.” After trying the device for six weeks (on a total audience of about forty-five thousand people), Vicary concluded the messages were getting through. His report on the experiment claimed that sales of popcorn rose 57.8 percent and those of Coca-Cola increased 18 percent.
Vicary’s experiments sparked a public outcry against subliminal advertising. What isn’t so well known is that Vicary’s experiments have been discredited scientifically as well as ethically. His tachistoscopic messages were on the screen for a fleeting one-three-thousandth second. Previous experiments in psychology laboratories had shown that information could be conveyed at a sub-or semiconscious level by the tachistoscope. But the shutter speeds in the laboratory experiments were usually around one-hundredth second—about thirty times slower than Vicary’s device.
No scientist himself, Vicary did not design the experiment very well. Popcorn sales may have surged, but there was no control. Psychologists have since countered that the increase may have been a random fluctuation, a seasonal change of taste, or the result of expectant vendors pushing their product harder. No one else has since shown that one-three-thousandth-second messages can dictate behavior. Vicary’s experiments raised an offbeat, perhaps important ethical issue, but if they caused even one person to buy popcorn or Coke, he did not demonstrate it in a way that most psychologists will accept.
So effectively did Vicary’s tachistoscope blacken the name of subliminal advertising that only one instance of a high-speed ad has turned up in all the years since. This was in a Christmas-season-1973 TV commercial for a child’s game, “HŨsker DŨ” Four times during the commercial, the words “Get it!” flashed for a split second. By then, the National Association of Broadcasters had long since banned subliminal material on member stations; the stations running the spot apparently were not aware of the high-speed inserts. A Federal Communications Commission warning resulted in the spots being pulled from the air in the United States.
A subliminal message need not have a commercial purpose. A very short message or shot edited into the final print of a movie will appear every time the movie is shown; no special equipment is needed.
Such tinkering is quantized. The briefest image possible is one that occupies a single frame of the film. A message or shot can last for one frame, two frames, three frames, but never less than a whole frame. Movies are projected at a rate of twenty-four frames a second. So each frame is on the screen for one-twenty-fourth second—actually, a hair less than that because the screen flickers to black for an instant while the next frame shifts into place.
A blink of an eye lasts about one-tenth second—long enough to blot out a one-or two-frame insert for a given viewer. But even a single-frame shot lasts several times longer than typical (one-hundredth-second) tachistoscopic stimuli of psych labs. How noticeable a shot is depends on the surrounding cinematography. Projected in a darkened theater, a single all-white frame surrounded by an opaque leader is visible as a flash on the screen. Of course, in a normal movie, the illusion of motion demands that single frames not be consciously perceptible.
Expectations influence perception. Movie projectionists have no trouble spotting the reel-change indicators (rough circles scratched into the upper right corner of a dozen or so consecutive frames). Yet the average viewer may sit through a two-hour movie without consciously perceiving the markings. Depending on the filmmaker’s intentions and ingenuity, a shot may linger on the screen for some time and still be missed by those who don’t know exactly what to look for. The subliminal grades into the merely inconspicuous.
Some avant-garde filmmakers have toyed with single-frame shots. Robert Breer’s Images by Images I (1954) consists entirely of single-frame images. In a sense, the whole film is “subliminal” material. The eye adjusts to the visual anarchy enough to pick out many individual images, though.
Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966) alternates all-black and all-white frames for an effect aptly described by the title. (The film is claimed to be dangerous for epileptics.)
Narrative films with significant hidden content are few and far between. The short list below does not include one sometime candidate, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (New Line Cinema, 1974). Director/cowriter Tobe Hooper raised eyebrows in a 1977 New Times interview by acknowledging subliminal techniques in the film. Hooper denied any one-frame shots, however. If there is hidden content in Chainsaw, no one seems to have identified it.
Psychologist Robert Corrigan and engineer Hal C. Becker founded the Precon Process and Equipment Corporation in New Orleans to exploit a tachistoscopic device of their invention, the “Precon.” In the late 1950s, they produced two ultralow budget horror films “in Psychorama.” The first, My World Dies Screaming, was shown in the United States and (as Terror in the Haunted House) Great Britain. Apparently it is no longer in release. According to descriptions, there are four embedded images. A tachistoscopic skull is supposed to evoke death; a pair of beating hearts suggests love; a snake projects hate; the word “BLOOD” reinforces fear. There is no indication that the film was any more emotionally riveting because of these devices.
A Date with DeathPrecon Process and Equipment Corporation, c. 1959
Corrigan and Becker’s other film.
The Exorcist is apparently the only major-studio release to use subliminal inserts. The plot follows a young girl, Regan, who is possessed by the devil. A priest, Father Karras, is called in to exorcise the demon. Of the many special effects used by director William Friedkin, one is very brief shots of a ghoulish face. In a dream, Karras sees his mother coming out of a subway—and the face flashes on the screen. Later, Karras tries to kill Regan, and the face shot is repeated.
If you examine a print of the film, you find that the shots last two frames. The face is on the screen for one-twelfth second—rather on the longish side of subliminal. No one who knows about the face should have much trouble getting a glimpse of it. But nearly everyone who did not know about the face when they saw the movie does not remember seeing it.
The spliced-in frames show a ghostly white face looking something like Father Karras (perhaps it is Karras with different makeup). The mouth and eyes are outlined in red. The face wears a white shroud. Later in the film, when Karras becomes possessed, his face turns pale, much like the subliminal face.
It has also been claimed that the word “PIG” appears subliminally. The word appears as a graffito near the stairs behind the house. It is never on the screen for more than a moment.
It is a moot point whether the subliminal material makes the film any scarier. Neither the two-frame face nor the graffito PIG” is particularly gruesome compared to the rest of the film. If they have any effect at all, it can only be to create a sense of apprehension. They may not even do that
Dark Star, John Carpenter’s first film, has a cult following on late night television It is a science-fiction comedy shot for sixty thou*sand dollars with a group of Carpenter’s fellow University of Southern California students. The script is bright, the special effects cheesy: One “space suit” was reportedly made from a cookie tin, a vacuum-cleaner hose, and styrofoam packing material from a typewriter case. The Dark Star is a spaceship that locates “unstable” worlds and destroys them. The lately psychotic crew is captained by a dead but still conscious commander in the ship’s deep freeze. One of the ship’s cache of introspective bombs must be talked out of premature explosion. The film’s brief hidden message is flashed momentarily on a computer panel: “FUCK YOU HARRIS.”
Who is Harris? He is Jack H. Harris, the film’s producer and distributor. Best known for The Blob and The Eyes of Laura Mars, Harris backed Dark Star after Carpenter and friends’ self-funding (some six thousand dollars) ran out. In its first celluloid incarnation, Dark Star ran for forty-five minutes on sixteen-millimeter stock. Harris’ money bankrolled another thirty-eight minutes’ worth of footage and. the transfer to thirty-five-millimeter stock necessary for commercial release. Be that as it may, a rift developed between Carpenter and Harris. Carpenter and cowriter Dan O’Bannon were perfectionists; Harris was a corner-cutter. At one point Carpenter and O’Bannon allegedly sabotaged the sound track so that Harris would have to move the work from a discount film dubber to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Dark Star had limited distribution in its 1974 release. It was rereleased after Star Wars and has been popular in revival since. Local TV stations presumably are not aware of the fleeting obscenity, but the film is often heavily edited for television